Submitted by:   David Crawford
                dwc@berlin.snafu.de

The Birn & Goldhagen conflict should be seen within the context of a
current trend in corporate public relations policy. Companies are
learning to use their financial and legal resources in a sophisticated
manner to control both research and the presentation of information.
This involves both carrots and sticks. I'd like to give an example
from my own experience in recent months, albeit without giving the
names of the respective companies. I should say, however, that these
are all major multinational corporations.

Several months ago I was working on a story for a major German
magazine. One of the companies we were investigating (Company "Q")
agreed to co-operate, but also threatened in writing a 350 million DM
lawsuit should any "false" information be published. False information
in this sense would be any information, which might be accurate, but
which we were unable to prove in a court of law.

A legal dispute of this magnitude in Germany is so expensive that I
was surprised the story was not canceled right then. Just having a
lawyer glance through documents where 350 million DM in damages are
threatened can lead to a multi-million DM legal fee even if the case
never goes to court. In effect the publisher was forced to bet the
farm on this story. Not many people are willing to do that.

A second consequence was that the quality of our documentation had to
be beyond question. When you submit a story for publication at a major
magazine the story has to pass several hurdles. If it is accepted by
the editor, then it is passed to documentation for checking. This
review is very exact, but there is a big difference between the
documentation which I am willing to submit to peer reviewers in the
publishing house and evidence which I am willing or able to present in
court. In the above case it meant that we had to go back and find new
sources for every fact which we wanted to publish. In other words,
confidential sources are not acceptable for a story with this legal
risk. This greatly increased the production costs. Historians reading
this might laugh. My complaint is that I was forced to submit to the
standards of documentation which are required for any scientific
research.

One advantage that we had was that none of our sources knew our true
interest. We never told anyone what the real topic was until they read
it in the magazine. If we had been more forthright, almost nobody
would have co-operated with us. We researched sub-topics of the story
using different sources. Lawyers at company "Q" believed we were
planning to question the value of their stock. This was not our
primary interest, but we certainly asked a lot of questions. Company
"Q" could not afford to give the appearance it was withholding
information pertinent to the value of its stock. As we hoped, the
information we needed to document our true story was given to us as a
by-product of the other disclosures. Clearly the investigation would
have been impossible without editorial secrecy on the part of the
research team.

Company "Q"'s strategy was to make us dependent upon its public
affairs office by threatening to sue us if we used other sources. We
could only use sources which we were willing to reveal in court.
Company "Q"'s information policy was to only provide information which
would force us to kill the story because our "prejudices" (as they saw
it) would be proved to be wrong. Does a multi-million dollar law suit
make people more objective? As mentioned above, our secrecy policy got
us past this hurdle; we were ready for publication. Therefore
Company "Q" changed its strategy.

We submitted the story a week before the next possible publication
date. Now Company "Q" got in touch with the magazine's advertising
department. It threatened to cancel all advertising if the story
should be published. The magazine said it would go with the story
anyway. Later one of my colleagues commented, "It was the kind of
issue where you have to resign if they don't publish." The message:
the journalist has to go if the publisher chickens out.

Happy ending: Company "Q" spent a couple hundred thousand DM to buy a
two-page spread in the publication to counteract the story. And its
advertising budget at this magazine has not changed. No, I did not get
a percentage. Not even a thank you. I was advised to keep a low
profile until it became clear that there would not be any legal
action.

Other German media have not been as fortunate. The German Telekom
recently canceled a week of its advertising via the ARD to protest a
news report on one of its magazine programs.

This is forcing serious researchers to change their own strategies.
One response should be to stand firm, but this is easier said than
done. I personally was surprised to see our story published. As it
turned out, the magazine made money despite the conflict (due to the
rebuttal ad), but who could have predicted it? On the other hand the
ARD suffered a financial loss in its conflict with the Telekom. The
stakes are very high.

To bring all this together. I see the Birn & Goldhagen conflict as
part of a larger trend. Financial and legal resources are increasingly
being used (abused) as part of a calculated public affairs policy. In
my opinion, a confrontation with other scholars was an important part
of the marketing strategy for Goldhagen's book. Many months after
publication, a legal dispute (or worries about one) has put the book's
title back in the headlines. It would cost thousands of dollars to buy
a comparable amount of advertising. And the beauty of the strategy
(intentional or unintentional) is that Birn is forced to pay half the
advertising costs via her legal fees. How are book sales doing?

There are some related issues, which I won't go into here (this is
long enough already), but which I hope will also be part of this
discussion.

 1) The use (misuse) of privacy issues to inhibit research
and publication.

2) The importance of corporate funding of scholarly research. I
frequently hear of papers which would be important for my own
projects, but which are unavailable because they were funded
by a company which wants to keep the results under wraps.

David Crawford

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